


in spiritu sancti

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Ancients, Character Study, Gen, Hades - Freeform, Injury, Mortality, Rumination, Solus!Emet, ascians - Freeform, bigmonstere, generic npc death, mild violence mostly implied, pre-imperial Garlemald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22272484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: Pawns. They are supposed to be pawns.So why does he remember them?
Comments: 8
Kudos: 41





	in spiritu sancti

He is pondering hot elixirs, served in hot hand-mashed ceramic, to shivering, weak, sickening and hungry bodies. 

Food he has watched ancient sundered men die from not having.

Simple gifts for simple, yet too often abandoned, needs. He was always able to taste the love on the spoon...

It only sickened him that sundered humanity could tolerate a world where this love was not given. The first time he's weak with hunger and a widow feeds him broth from ladle to lips, he starts crying.

This never would have happened in his world.

What's he to do with love so shattered that it leaves its own to die?

He's fallen in love with the way mortal hands handle mortals' baked bread. When he sinks mortal teeth into it, he understands why these creatures, these soldiers, suffer through fear and indignity and mud.

He understands why the boys he's seen sent along under him to the gruesomeness of war still want to celebrate when they've made it through another battle; when they come back all but destroyed, but they're alive (inasmuch as anything on par with a mere simulation is Alive).

The lad thrusts his hand with the foaming uncorked nozzle up to his face, his eyes bright with shock and adrenaline, his white hair sweat-slicked to the sides of his head where his helmet had lain.

_"Galvus, you first. You did it, you bloody bastard. It was your idea and we_ **_won_ ** _."_

The boy is smiling so wide that Emet-Selch can see the slick grooves of his molars' enamel. He can't be older than 19. He suspects that, like himself, the lad might have been lying through those teeth to make it to the field.

He affects an appreciative half-smile on his Garlean lips. "Give it here, then, Pilus. If you insist..." When the first bottle is down his throat, his golden eyes shine bright and wet with the drink, and theatrically he holds his armored arms wide, making a scene of the empty bottle and the one or two soaplike bubbles that drool from the glass neck at the end.

The medicii make their rounds in quiet vigil as those in better fettle grow dizzy around the campfire.

He thinks he loves them, then.

How long can he afford it to last?

The fire and the drink make the colours almost dreamlike. It's far from comfortable, but their souls seem bright for what they are. _If only you knew._

He eyes the bruised nail beds of his comrades, the contusions they're ignoring at their peril. There's a lower rank officer with a squadron under him whose lip was busted in an axen shove to his helm. He doesn't have it in him to tell the lad that he's let it suck up the spore-rich soil of this terrain.

"You."

His voice is loud and clear; the dullness of it masked below the mantle of authority. There's that first badge on his breast, after all. 

The lad with the bloody lip looks up from his cupful of stew at that. "'Ey?"

"Yes, you. Take it." He tosses an unopened flask at the lad.

Emet-Selch knows a little of their chemistry now.

Since made for libations and not for medicine, the sugar and starch is like to risk him further trouble, but it's the best--the most palliative--he has on hand, in the marshy trench this gutter-rut part of the map of Ilsabard.

The fellow is in no place to argue, tired eyes agleam at the offer. First swallow of an untouched bottle of spirits, and by the Land, his mouth hurts.

Mud-encrusted, strained-leathered gloves twist the thing open, and, just as Emet-Selch suspects, the first third of the bottle is spent simply falling over the wound on the lad's mouth like a seasonal rainstorm.

Emet-Selch is suddenly--in the nerves of his old name, in the raw reverberations along his spine that guide his spirit's boldest forms--aware of something.

This soldier will die tomorrow morning.

His mouth twists in what he hopes will go unnoticed. He sees the lad's ghost lolling wide with the laughs that come braying past the incision of his mouth. 

The Ascian Garlean ponders his choices.

In all technicality, the boy is beneath his rank, though only just. Republics disliked a _funnel_ of verticality, and so even among storm-battered canvas tents, the authority of one man with men and boys under his watch versus another's was open for debate.

That was, if there was a soul who still cared for debate once all had crawled their way back to camp.

He folds his hands thoughtfully in front of his face, narrowing his gaze at the squadron commander.

"Your name."

"Eh? Oh--forgive me, I--"

"Your name, Pilus. The name of your blood or your law, either will suffice."

Already halfway to slumber in drink, the young man stares with his battered mouth half open. "Oh--Oh, that'll be, uh, that'll be my father's name. That'll be, uh... Oi, I guess my dad's side... Scaeva, sir."

Emet-Selch feels his nose twitch.

_Scaeva_. Hm.

How provincial.

He nods, slowly, sagely, instead of stating his derision out loud.

"Wash that up. Not with water. The water here's been aspected--and at any rate, now, it's a slurry of ground reserves and your foes' viscera. Take the next flask for yourself and go to your cot. Those are orders. Do you understand, Pilus Scaeva?"

The young man shrugs off the rest of his helmet, and it's then that he sees what will take the man even if he should outlast the infection fomenting in his bloodied mouth now.

Bruises, awful, deep, black, and worse in their implications. 

He remembers they have made war with the roving bands of Roegadyn mercenary clans who but recently served them. He had seen to it himself they were underpaid. 

This should not have bothered him.

It was always accursed in his mind, somehow, when they were too stupid to understand what was happening to them.

"Uh--aye, oh, yes, sir, Centurio sir. Aye, right away. Should I, ah--"

"No. Pray give that most menial of tasks to your underlings."

Beginning to sway, the pilus fumbles with his soiled head linens to the next member of his squadron, nodding officiatingly as if cold sober.

He felt the jowls of this body forming early under the grimace he wore, watching the younger man stagger to his tent.

___________

Night came quicker on the battlefield than on the farm or the forum, and so Emet-Selch waited, his Garlean body rolling its shoulders at the frigid breeze.

The cookfire was dying. The lad was dying.

He needed his senses clear, and had switched covertly to imbibing a hot clear broth instead of the fermentations of his comrades’ delight.

At long last he felt the unsteady, slurring pat on the pauldron of his guardmate, changing shifts in the night. He'd bought them the advantage of a camp that scarcely needed more than a man an hour on either border of the site; still, he thought it best to cast the undrunk broth over the embers. 

They hissed in a fashion he almost thought insulting.

The shadowless fibers of his spirit grew light and limber in the absence of the fire.

The man whose underlings knew as Solus Galvus treaded lighter than air on flame-hewn metal toes toward the beds of the dying.

He eased the flap of the tent open, the dead and windless air allowing no stimulating gust into the slumbering quarters.

Ah. There it was.

The milky-pale soul of the commander with the broken lip was already flickering, fighting to keep the plasmic stitches together on the heavily bruised face of its vessel.

Emet-Selch allowed his lids to flutter closed. Sentimentality earned him nothing, and after all--how much worse would this pain and indignity be to a soul rich enough to understand its defilement?

He shook his head, the few white strands escaping their tuck behind his ear.

He had no one to whom to justify this decision.

A corpselike pallor had wandered into the sockets and sallow cheeks of the younger commander. He was not like to last until the sun came up, and sleeping was doing little save to make the pitiful creature squirm in the ignorance of its danger.

The Ascian craned his neck to look at the ceiling-point of the tent. It wouldn't be enough. He sighed as quietly as he could manage, vowing to make the cleanup quick, even if one bewildered sergeant happened to rouse in the midst of it.

Stuff for legends. Allag had built its ego upon less, after all.

He exhaled as slowly as his mortal lungs would allow ere they began to cramp with the pollution of unusable gas.

Then he called the will to himself, the endless river, forever and ever, the water of life into his giant soul.

Night itself snaked under his armour and stole the luminosity from lantern and feeble magiteknical device alike. His body soared, his back taking bone-breaking flight.

He opened four white-hot eyes, gently shrugging away the yawning canvas of the crumpled tent.

With an ancient gaze he looked once more at the tiny, larval, unthriving thing to whom he had not bells before offered a full ewer of spirits, to numb his senses. 

To chase away the little knowledge of the cosm that broken souls still knew. That broken souls most feared.

_Him._

_Death._

Pearl-bright, pearl-soft palms ensconced the failing body below him, carefully avoiding contact with his golden claws.

To die, to sleep no more; someday, the soul of a poet would recite these words to him.

At the moment, they were as unspoken and true things that his prehensile wings might have signed to himself.

Four white, infernal eyes closed in meditation.

_Never ceases to amaze me_ , said the gentle voice of a lost friend in the back of his mind. His too-large hands laid the softest part of a fingertip over the boy's battered mouth.

_Never ceases to amaze me._

__

None had woken in the process, despite the groaning undoing of the tent stakes in the slipshod soil.

Solus huffed in the freezing air, replanting the damned things, hoisting the pinnacle of the structure up with one hand (and one extra Hand, since no man was yet looking).

He heaved a sigh that condensed on his face as a light goatee of frost flakes.

All was as it had been before, save one thing.

He massaged his chest, the flickering warmth of a splinter of soul magnetising to his gift.

When the sun came up over the permafrost the next morn, the lads would be shaken, but at peace. Their commander, autopsy would later reveal, would have lived approximately six more suns--at most, a fortnight--but it would have been in necrotising agony and terror, with little sleep to break up the madness.

There was drink left over from the last night's victory; Solus watched fondly as his men shared it among their breakfast.

__

He yawned. 

Oh dear.

"Ah. Pray forgive me, young one. Your name was--?"

The boy was unnerved, his skinny body making a shrug of the graduating regalia he wore.

" _Scaeva_ , Your Radiance. Nero Scaeva."

His eyes rolled in opposite directions, damp with encroaching blindness.

"Ah. Yes, of course--Scae--" His lip twitched into the ocean of white beard he had allowed to grow in his wife's lateness.

The name was familiar for reasons aging men should not be fond of. "Ah. Scaev--er. Mmm? Sc--"

The academy headmaster nudged him hard in the shoulder. He scowled, but tried to focus his glassy golden gaze on the boy.

Gaunt, burning with ambition. Underfed--in both body and opportunity.

The child had eyes of bloodletting-sharp ice, intelligent, hungry. Sorrowfully, Emet-Selch realised where such tropes of children fell on the universal chessboard that stood between him and home.

A wispy, cornflower forelock escaped unceremoniously from the young Garlean's temple. Exactly the strands he himself had once spent undue of his vessel's energy to conform to his liking--a childish curlicue.

He was weary.

He'd been weary for several empires of men when he had kissed the boy's grand-uncle goodnight.

Something left his lips hat he knew wasn't the correct way to speak the child's name, and sorely, in his mildewing years he realised the boy would remember.

_You would have excelled in the Akadaemia_ , his mind thought, the fog of an old mortal's feebleness coming to claim him.

"Our sincerest apologies, dear studentship," a kindly voice said beside him as he dozed away. "His Radiance requires--"

__________

In his dreams, Hades beheld the flickering fragment of the young man. 

_'Was I really going to die that night?'_

He nods, unsure of what face the shade is seeing.

_'W-well, why was it up to you how it happened? How is it_ **_you_ ** _know any better?_ ' The shard's voice was hot with anguish.

He closed his many eyes, thinking of an answer.

Usually, he waved them away. They were often as not only recitatives of the last truly cogent thing the fragment experienced ere they swam away to the Underworld.

Something gnawed at his heart for this one of endless cogs of the machine that would be Garlemald.

_'{ Mayhap it was not mine only to decide how you passed. What then? Shall I show you instead the common misery you might have shared? }'_

The fragment softened, as if pondering. _'...No. I--hear me, spirit. We hold few gods in this land already, myself least of all. Could'ye maybe give me this, though, eh?'_

Two sets of eyes blinked languidly, calmly.

_'{ Speak it. }''_

_'...Aye, well, right--it's this. See, I've a nephew just now whose wife's like to start them a family, right? You're the same folk as that madman Galvus, aye? Well, if I'm dying tonight, le'me give you this much. Eh? Her kid's got to get it right, you know, eh? Just...'_ The spirit's hands flail. _'...We don't 'ave much. It's cold as witches' wombs up there, mind. But could ye tell me how the kid's farin'?'_

Hades restrains four limbs' worth of massaging his forehead in ache.

He sifts over the memories like waves over new sand.

Nero. Mmm, that child was given the name Nero, and a gift among popoto farmers he had indeed been born to be. He remembered his aging body's miscalculations, and soured.

_'{ She is well, as is the youth. A testament to... }'_

_To what?_

_'{ ...to the potential of your kin.}'_

The ruminating aether of the fellow seemed satisfied. He nodded, slowly. If words formed his spirit's sublimating thoughts, Hades' mind skipped the step of receiving them in language.

___________

Solus zos Galvus' body was cooling in its casket, and Hades, the last Emet-Selch of Amaurot, gently acceded to the adjourning of this court.

Some names he held close to his breast no matter the vessel.

_Hers_ most dearly.

_Hers_ sang him to sleep.

He hoped that when he was stirred again, it would be to a realm rejoined.

.

~

**Author's Note:**

> this happened by accident in dms with a friend of mine
> 
> i have no excuses, defenses, or explanations DO NOT QUESTION ME ON THIS


End file.
